When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig

George Prochnik is the author of “The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig
at the End of the World” and “Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for
Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem,” which is out in March from Other Press.

The Austrian émigré writer Stefan Zweig composed the first draft of his memoir, “The World of Yesterday,”
in a feverish rapture during the summer of 1941, as headlines gave
every indication that civilization was being swallowed in darkness.
Zweig’s beloved France had fallen to the Nazis the previous year. The
Blitz had reached a peak in May, with almost fifteen hundred Londoners
dying in a single night. Operation Barbarossa, the colossal invasion of
the Soviet Union by the Axis powers, in which nearly a million people
would die, had launched in June. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing
squads, roared along just behind the Army, massacring Jews and other
vilified groups—often with the help of local police and ordinary
citizens.

Zweig himself had fled Austria
preëmptively, in 1934. During the country’s brief, bloody civil war that
February, when Engelbert Dollfuss, the country’s Clerico-Fascist
Chancellor, had destroyed the Socialist opposition, Zweig’s Salzburg
home had been searched for secret arms to supply the left-wing militias.
Zweig at the time was regarded as one of Europe’s most prominent
humanist-pacifists, and the absurd crudity of the police action so
outraged him that he began packing his things that night. From Austria,
Zweig and his second wife, Lotte, went to England, then to the New
World, where New York City became his base, despite his aversion to its
crowds and abrasive competitiveness. In June of 1941, longing for some
respite from the needs of the exiles in Manhattan beseeching him for
help with money, work, and connections, the couple rented a modest,
rather grim bungalow in Ossining, New York, a mile uphill from Sing Sing
Correctional Facility. There, Zweig set to furious work on his
autobiography—laboring like “seven devils without a single walk,” as he
put it. Some four hundred pages poured out of him in a matter of weeks.
His productivity reflected his sense of urgency: the book was conceived
as a kind of message to the future. It is a law of history, he wrote,
“that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of
the great movements which determine their times.” For the benefit of
subsequent generations, who would be tasked with rebuilding society from
the ruins, he was determined to trace how the Nazis’ reign of terror
had become possible, and how he and so many others had been blind to its
beginnings.

Zweig
noted that he could not remember when he first heard Hitler’s name. It
was an era of confusion, filled with ugly agitators. During the early
years of Hitler’s rise, Zweig was at the height of his career, and a
renowned champion of causes that sought to promote solidarity among
European nations. He called for the founding of an international
university with branches in all the major European capitals, with a
rotating exchange program intended to expose young people to other
communities, ethnicities, and religions. He was only too aware that the
nationalistic passions expressed in the First World War had been
compounded by new racist ideologies in the intervening years. The
economic hardship and sense of humiliation that the German citizenry
experienced as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty had created a
pervasive resentment that could be enlisted to fuel any number of
radical, bloodthirsty projects.

Zweig
did take notice of the discipline and financial resources on display at
the rallies of the National Socialists—their eerily synchronized
drilling and spanking-new uniforms, and the remarkable fleets of
automobiles, motorcycles, and trucks they paraded. Zweig often travelled
across the German border to the little resort town of Berchtesgaden,
where he saw “small but ever-growing squads of young fellows in riding
boots and brown shirts, each with a loud-colored swastika on his
sleeve.” These young men were clearly trained for attack, Zweig
recalled. But after the crushing of Hitler’s attempted putsch, in 1923,
Zweig seems hardly to have given the National Socialists another thought
until the elections of 1930, when support for the Party exploded—from
under a million votes two years earlier to more than six million. At
that point, still oblivious to what this popular affirmation might
portend, Zweig applauded the enthusiastic passion expressed in the
elections. He blamed the stuffiness of the country’s old-fashioned
democrats for the Nazi victory, calling the results at the time “a
perhaps unwise but fundamentally sound and approvable revolt of youth
against the slowness and irresolution of ‘high politics.’ “

In
his memoir, Zweig did not excuse himself or his intellectual peers for
failing early on to reckon with Hitler’s significance. “The few among
writers who had taken the trouble to read Hitler’s book, ridiculed the
bombast of his stilted prose instead of occupying themselves with his
program,” he wrote. They took him neither seriously nor literally. Even
into the nineteen-thirties, “the big democratic newspapers, instead of
warning their readers, reassured them day by day, that the movement . . .
would inevitably collapse in no time.” Prideful of their own higher
learning and cultivation, the intellectual classes could not absorb the
idea that, thanks to “invisible wire-pullers”—the self-interested groups
and individuals who believed they could manipulate the charismatic
maverick for their own gain—this uneducated “beer-hall agitator” had
already amassed vast support. After all, Germany was a state where the
law rested on a firm foundation, where a majority in parliament was
opposed to Hitler, and where every citizen believed that “his liberty
and equal rights were secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution.” ...